The Joint Admission Matriculation Board (JAMB) has warned newly established institutions to avoid illegal practices and adhere to due process when admitting new students.

Ishaq Oloyede, JAMB registrar, said this at an interactive session on Monday with principal officers of the newly established, upgraded, and adopted universities, polytechnics, and colleges of education in Abuja.

Mr Oloyede outlined the best practices and the legal process for sourcing students and explained how it was done through the “Market Place” on the Central Admissions Processing System (CAPS).

He warned against illegal admissions and clarified procedures for candidate placement as institutions prepared for the 2024/2025 admission cycle.

“Whoever admits a candidate illegally, whether in a private or public institution, will be dealt with. We don’t want them to commit the offence; some of them ignorantly commit the offence.

“We are now exposing them to how to get and achieve their desire without violating any of the rules,” he said.

He emphasised the need for automation, compliance, and capacity building as new institutions join the nation’s higher education system.

“This meeting is to introduce you to the regulatory framework guiding admission processing on the CAPS. They need orientation because we don’t receive paper mail from them; it has been automated.

“We need to build up their capacity so that they don’t run into problems, particularly when the students appear to be more advanced in doing things wrongly,” Mr Oloyede said.

The JAMB registrar highlighted the impact of ASUU strikes, overlapping sessions, and ongoing efforts to test JAMB system redundancies during the mock UTME to ensure the smooth operation of the examination.

“Some of them are still going at their own pace, finishing 2021 in 2023 and finishing 2022 in 2024. We are running four concurrent sessions; this would not have been possible if we had not planned it properly.

“This year, what we did was to test all the redundancies, and we have to be sure that they are working,” he said.

Mr Oloyede added that over 100 new tertiary institutions joined Nigeria’s higher education landscape.

He explained that 15 upgraded federal colleges of education with dual mandates, offering NCE and degrees, and 22 new universities (some adopted, some upgraded) were on the list.

According to him, 33 new polytechnics/monotechnics and 12 new colleges of education are also on the list.

Paulinus Okwelle, executive secretary of the National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE), emphasised the increasing complexity of the admission process and stated the importance of understanding it.

Mr Okwelle said JAMB’s procedure had changed, and the new institutions needed to familiarise themselves with the processes and procedures to compete fairly during special admission considerations.

He highlighted JAMB’s efforts to introduce cutting-edge technology and innovative approaches to improve the system.

Mr Okwelle noted that with the improvement in the processing system, things would change; therefore, new institutions need to take action and exploit development to become better than the existing institutions.